“It went through their armor?”
She glanced at Farley. “They might as well have been naked,” she said.
Vanden stared at the bristling metal war machine suspended above the table. “They still use the same armor we do?”
“Networked carbon filament mesh,” said Grobe. He hesitated. “I should mention that Captain Farley’s crew brought one of the mounted weapons here with them,” he said. “In addition to personal firearms.”
Vanden glanced at Wennda. This time she met his gaze unblinkingly.
Farley leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “What is your interest in my aircraft?” he asked.
Vanden raised an eyebrow—the most expression he’d shown since he came into the room. “Your aircraft defeated the Typhon,” he said.
“You call that a defeat?” said Farley.
“You weren’t killed.”
“I think I have a different definition of victory.”
“No one has ever gone against the Typhon and survived,” said Vanden.
“You should see what we do to Messerschmitts.”
Vanden regarded Farley blankly. He laced his fingers and pressed his palms tightly together. “Based on the reports from Wennda and her … accomplices … and based on your actions against the Redoubt troops, I have to concede that her theory that you’ve come here from somewhere else may have merit.”
Farley rubbed his face with both hands. He didn’t know how much longer he could stay awake. He felt worn so thin you could probably shine a candle through him. “Well, I guess that’s a relief,” he said.
“Why would that be?”
“Because we don’t want to be here any more than you want us here. Maybe we did fly through some big hole in the sky, but we sure as hell didn’t mean to. We just want to get our ship back and go home.”
“And you think it will be that simple.”
“I think the goal is. I couldn’t tell you about achieving it.”
“And that’s your objective. To go back to where you came from.”
Farley shrugged. “What else?” he asked, more testily than he’d intended. “You all seem like very nice people, and I’m grateful for your help, but we didn’t mean to come here.”
Vanden tapped the tabletop and the miniature Morgana reappeared between them. He turned his hand and spread his fingers, and the bomber rotated and enlarged and rotated until the nose art hovered in the air. “Then please explain to me,” said Vanden, “how you didn’t mean to come here in an aircraft with a picture of my daughter on it.”
“Your—” Farley looked from the coldly furious commander to Wennda, who shrugged helplessly.
fourteen
Farley opened his eyes and blinked up at a paneled ceiling. The light directly above him was out. Voices murmured in conversation but he couldn’t make out what they were saying.
He smelled coffee. He sat up.
“Morning, sunshine.”
Broben sat with Yone at a small table that hadn’t been there earlier. Jerry was smoking a Lucky, and both men were drinking coffee. Jerry lifted his cup at Farley. “Still hot,” he said. “I ate the last doughnut, though.”
“Shit. If this place ever heard of a doughnut, I’ll eat my hat.” Farley saw that he had slept curled against a wall with his flight jacket rolled up for a pillow. He got to his feet and went to the table and sat down heavily in a folding chair. The table seemed to have emerged from the wall like a retractable counter supported on two thin folding legs. Farley pushed on it. It didn’t feel as rickety as it looked.
Yone poured coffee from a plastic pitcher with a screw-on cap and held the cup out to him. Farley accepted it with a grateful nod. The stackable plastic cup was thin but did not get hot in his hands. He held it beneath his nose and inhaled. He felt the coffee lighting up his veins before he even took a sip. “That’s the stuff, all right,” he said.
He set the cup down and Jerry lit a cigarette off of his and handed it over. Farley saluted with it. He closed his eyes and dragged. Coffee and a smoke. Hell, he was practically back home.
He ran a hand over his stubble, then opened his eyes and frowned at Broben. “How the hell did you shave?” he asked.
“Razor in the survival kit. No soap, though.” Broben rubbed a cheek. “My face feels like a peeled potato.”
“You should see it from this side.” Farley blew smoke up at the ceiling, enjoying the return of the nicotine rush. He glanced around the barracks. “So they brought us some furniture?” he asked.
Broben shook his head. “It was here the whole time. Show him, Yone.”
Yone smiled his quick on-off smile and stood up. He went to the wall and pulled out what Farley at first took for a tall, narrow drawer. Except that the drawer kept pulling out, to reveal a kind of cross-section of a staircase. The hollows beneath the steps were storage units. Yone went up the steps and pressed on the wall, then slid a section of it aside to reveal a recessed bunk. “There are eight bunks in this unit,” he said. He went to the opposite wall and folded down a section and pulled it out to reveal a boxy sofa. “Two couches.” He folded it back and pulled out another drawer that had a flat top. Perfectly fitted beneath it were two tall chairs. More shelving and more storage was tucked away in other recesses.
“I don’t know if it’s a barracks or a cuckoo clock,” said Broben.
“Where’d they hide the head?” said Farley.
“Down the hall,” said Broben. “Wait’ll you get a load of that.”
Farley frowned. “Is it afternoon?”
“It’s next morning,” said Broben. “We let you sleep in. You were pretty loopy when they brought you back yesterday.”
“Where are the men?”
“Outside playing catch, if you can believe that.”
Farley snorted. “I can.”
“Your girlfriend came by already. Said she’ll be back later.” Broben pulled on his Lucky, flicked ash into his empty cup. “So you got the third degree from the CO yesterday. Yone says he’s a hardass.”
“He is that.” Farley stretched. “The girl’s his daughter.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Well. You got some hurdles there, pal.”
“Me and Jesse Owens.”
Broben snorted. “So what’s the skinny?” he asked. “They gonna help us get our ride back?”
Farley glanced at Yone.
Broben waved his cigarette. “Yone’s on the level, Joe. He’s been filling me in on this joint. You need to listen to this.”
Yone finished putting away the room’s ingenious slide-outs and collapsibles and foldables and joined them at the little table, smiling nervously.
“Thanks for the coffee,” said Farley.
Yone ducked his head. “It is synthetic, I’m afraid,” he said. “They don’t have coffee beans here. But it is not so bad.”
Farley sniffed his cup again. It smelled like coffee to him. He took a last deep drag from his cigarette and dropped the butt into the cup Broben was using as an ashtray. Time to clock in. Captain Midnight is on the air. “They have them where you come from?” Farley asked.
Yone nodded. “It’s quite a luxury, though. There is little room for growing nonessential crops.”
“What’s nonessential about coffee?” Broben asked.
Yone smiled. “I certainly prefer to live in a world that has it,” he said.
“You came from there?” Farley asked. “From the Redoubt?”
“Two years ago,” Yone said, and shrugged. “But I will always be a stranger here.”
“Because your city and this one are, what? Rivals?”
“One could put it that way.”
“How would you put it? Competitors? Resources must be pretty scarce around here.”
“The cities are almost entirely self-contained. They don’t rely on their surroundings for resources, because there are none, other than power.”
“Where does the power
come from?”
“For the Redoubt it is mostly solar. Here it is geothermal.”
“You don’t say.”
Yone smiled. “I don’t really understand them either.”
“So what’s the beef?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Why are they shooting at each other?”
Yone considered him for a moment. “No one here would ever ask that question,” he finally said, “because they have known the answer all their lives. The hatred between the Redoubt and the Dome is as much a part of their world as the air, the calorie ration, the conservation laws. It is a heritage.” He smiled thinly. “A birthright.”
“Well,” said Farley. “I’m not from around here.”
“But that is my point.” Yone poured Farley more coffee. “No one is not from around here.”
Farley waved at the room. “You mean no one in these bubbles ever sees anyone else.”
Yone glanced at Broben, who nodded for him to go on. “I mean,” Yone said, “there is no one else. The Dome and the Redoubt are the only two cities in the world.”
Farley studied him. “How is that possible?” he asked.
“War.”
“That’s a hell of a war.”
“Yes. It happened centuries ago.”
“Centuries. As in hundreds of years.”
Yone nodded. “The war lasted for decades, and it grew until it involved most of the world. At first it was fought with bullets and bombs, but as the stakes grew higher they used chemicals and diseases created in laboratories. They built machines that worked without operators, war machines that thought for themselves and adapted to their environments. That fought without fear or hesitation. Without mercy. Battalions of living machines that swarmed the cities and darkened the skies.”
“That’s hard to imagine.”
“You have seen an example already. Fought with it.”
Farley glanced at Broben. “That thing that attacked my bomber?” he asked.
“The Typhon is a remnant of that war,” said Yone. “Blindly following commands given to it by men dead for two hundred years.”
“To do what?”
“There is a powerful energy source still functioning beneath the ground. In the shaft at the center of the crater. The Typhon seems to be protecting it.”
“From what?”
“Anything it thinks is trying to gain access. Anything it thinks is a threat.”
“Then whatever’s down there must be a pretty big deal.”
Yone nodded. “It may be some kind of power generator. Or a weapon. No one knows, because no one who has tried to find out has returned. Whatever it is, it is powerful enough to disrupt the air for miles above the well. Now that you have come here in your aircraft, some people are wondering if that disruption is more … fundamental. A kind of breach in the universe. A tear in the world that you managed to find your way through. Commander Vanden’s daughter, Wennda, has come to believe this.”
“I’d say it’s a load of crap, but—” Farley waved to indicate the barracks, the Dome outside, the devastation beyond “—here we are.”
“I would not discount the possibility,” said Yone. “The energies they were manipulating by the end of the war were beyond our understanding. Weapons that took apart the very building blocks of matter. That destroyed entire cities in seconds. The scale of butchery is unimaginable. Millions killed in a single flash. Until finally they developed weapons that could destroy entire worlds.”
“Who in his right mind would use them?” Farley demanded. “It’d be suicide.”
“It was suicide,” Yone agreed. “As you have seen.”
Farley stared. “The crater?”
Yone’s quick nod encompassed inconceivable destruction. “An explosion so powerful it cracked the planet’s crust. Earthquakes and oceans of lava that destroyed entire nations. Much of the life that survived was killed in the ice age that came because the planet was covered by a cloud of ash. The world was in twilight for decades. Without sunlight the plants and trees began to die. The oceans died. Without these, everything else began to die.”
“From one explosion.”
“As far as anyone can determine, yes.”
“And we thought the Nazis were assholes,” said Broben.
Yone spread his hands. “Perhaps they didn’t realize the power of what they had made,” he said. “So much has been lost that no one is certain.”
Farley rubbed his stubbled jaw. “And you’ve all been waiting two hundred years for things to recover?”
“Oh, no.” Yone shook his head. “There will be no recovery. The explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere. So that when the cloud of ash finally began to disperse, the sun itself began to kill what had managed to remain alive. Beyond a certain point life could not recover. Too many links in the chain were broken. What remains is mosses, molds, lichens, many insects, some plants, perhaps a few small mammals such as rats. The atmosphere on the surface will no longer support human life. It is too thin. Too cold.”
“I don’t understand,” said Farley. “We spent a full day in it just fine.”
“We are at the bottom of a crater that is nearly three kilometers below the surface. Only here are the air pressure and temperature high enough to support life. That is why the shelters were built here.”
“The Redoubt and the Dome,” Farley realized.
Yone nodded. “There may have been others elsewhere, but only the two here could have lasted so long. And to this day they watch each other with great suspicion and dread across the heart of the thing that destroyed them.”
“Jesus,” said Broben. “Aren’t you the lucky ones.”
Yone looked at him. “People could not have survived in such conditions for centuries without being very clever and very strict, as well as being lucky,” he said, not recognizing Broben’s irony. “Resources are limited. There is no room for waste. Repurpose, reuse, repair. Every child is taught this so completely it is more like a law of nature than a set of rules. Life is highly regulated, and everyone must be useful.” He shrugged. “It has to be that way.”
“Two hundred years in a bottle,” Farley mused.
“In a bottle meant to last a tenth that long at most. But yes.” Yone considered them a moment. “Perhaps you can understand how shocking it is to see new faces,” he said. “To interact with a new person, when everyone is someone you have known since you were born. I am always reminded that I am not from here. I earn the calories I consume, but I will never truly earn the trust of my hosts. A new person will always be a stranger.”
“And then nine of us show up,” said Broben.
“Nine of you show up,” Yone agreed, “in an aircraft that can defeat the Typhon. And our enemies have it.”
*
The crew had got hold of a gray ball the size of a softball and were throwing it around in the barracks courtyard. Without gloves there was no point in rifling it to each other, so they were throwing pop flies and bouncers.
Garrett snagged the ball and was about to throw it again when he caught sight of Farley watching from the doorway. “Hey, look who’s up!” he yelled, and threw a long high fly his way.
Farley caught it. “Guy needs his beauty sleep,” he said, and threw it back.
“Gosh,” Shorty said in Jack Benny’s voice, “I’m sorry you had to cut it so short.”
Plavitz came around a corner, talking with the smartass joker they’d met here yesterday. Lang, Farley remembered. As Plavitz stepped into the courtyard he grinned at his crewmates and held up a stick like some conquering hero. The crew cheered, and Plavitz patted Lang’s shoulder. They immediately started organizing a game of stickball, recruiting from the male onlookers among the barracks residents.
Farley watched a moment longer, taking in the excited chatter, the perplexed expressions of the drafted players, the close horizon and faint geometry perceivable in the sky. The bizarre normalcy of the scene before him.
“Screwy, huh?” said Broben.
“You read my mind.”
“You want I should call a meeting?”
“No, let’s let them run a while before we put the leash back on.” Farley looked away from the incipient pickup game. “Where’s that potato peeler you used on your mug?” he asked. “I want to hit the head and make myself look at least as civilized as the rest of these monkeys.” He nodded at the crew.
Broben smiled knowingly and told him where he’d left the razor. “Have fun,” he said.
Farley thought it was an odd thing to say until he saw the facilities. Room for two, no sink, no towels. A brief jet of something that didn’t quite feel like water shot when you passed your hand through a gap in a vertical metal cylinder on one wall. The slanted toilet bowl held no water, and nothing stuck to the porcelain. Or whatever the hell it was. And it flushed itself when you were done.
Broben gave Farley a thumbs-up when he came back. “Say, mister,” he said, “you didn’t see an ugly, smelly guy dressed like you a second ago, did you?”
“Shit, shower, and shave,” said Farley. “Couldn’t figure out the shower part, though.”
“Nobody could. But there’s gotta be a garden hose around here somewhere.”
Farley leaned close to him and sniffed. “Fire hose,” he amended.
“Jeez, one shave and he’s a hygiene film—hey, here comes your dreamgirl. For your sake I hope her sense of smell ain’t so good.”
Wennda had entered the courtyard and was watching the crew trying to explain stickball to the men they’d drafted to play. Farley tried not to smirk at Martin showing Yone how to pitch. Wennda saw Farley across the courtyard and smiled and waved.
Broben put his hands on his hips and shook his head. “Well, will you look at that,” he said. “Why is it always the pilots?”
“You don’t see Clark Gable and Jimmy Cagney playing tail gunners, do you?”
“Would it kill them to play a copilot sometimes?”
Wennda wore a jumpsuit and not the skintight and paneled combat outfit she’d worn earlier, but someone—it had to have been Garrett or Everett—wolf whistled as she walked across the courtyard. Either she didn’t hear it or she ignored it. Or possibly, Farley realized, she had no idea what it meant.
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